Here's the thing though. You get interrupted 20 times a day, and 15 of those are questions you've answered a hundred times. Where do we keep the spare key. What do we charge for that. Who do I call if a customer's mad. Do we take that card. Every one of them is a 90-second answer and every one of them costs you 20 minutes because you lost your place in whatever you were doing.
And the reason it keeps happening isn't that your people are dumb. It's that the answers only exist in your head. There's nowhere else to look. So they look at you.
Every guru will tell you to "document your processes." Cool. Nobody does it, because sitting down to write an operations manual from a blank page is miserable and you'd rather do actual work.
So flip it. Don't write anything. Let it interview you.
What you need
- Claude
- 30 minutes of talking, which you can do driving if you use voice-to-text
- Somewhere to put the finished doc: Google Docs, a shared note, printed and taped to the wall, whatever your people will actually look at
Setup
- First, find out what the questions actually are. For three days, every time somebody asks you something, write it down. Just the question. Don't answer it in the notebook, you'll never do that. Three days is enough, you'll see the pattern fast.
- Open Claude, paste the interview prompt below, and answer the questions it asks. One at a time, out loud if you want, using the microphone button. Talk like you'd talk to a new person on day one. Ramble. It's fine.
- When it's done asking, run the second prompt to turn it into the actual document.
- Put the doc somewhere your people can get to it without asking you where it is. That's not a joke, that's the number one reason these die.
- Enforce it once. Next time somebody asks a question that's in the doc, you say "it's in the doc." One time. That's all it takes.
- Every time a new question comes up that isn't in there, add it. Two minutes. The doc pays for itself in a month.
The prompts
The interview:
I run a [YOUR BUSINESS TYPE] in [YOUR CITY] with [NUMBER] people
working with me. My team is [WHO THEY ARE, example: two techs and an
office person / four stylists / a front desk and three loan
processors].
I want to build an internal FAQ so my people stop asking me the same
questions. I'm bad at writing this stuff from scratch, so interview me.
Ask me ONE question at a time. Wait for my answer before the next one.
Start with the questions I get asked most, then go after the stuff I'd
never think to write down: what to do when something goes wrong, who
decides what, what we do and don't do, how we handle an unhappy
customer, what the rules are that I've never actually said out loud.
Keep going until you're confident somebody new could handle a normal
day without calling me. Then tell me you're done and summarize what we
covered.
Here are the questions I actually get asked, to get you started:
[PASTE THE LIST FROM YOUR THREE DAYS]Build the document:
Now turn everything from that interview into an internal FAQ document
for my team.
Structure:
- Group questions by topic, and put the most-asked group first
- Every entry is the question in the person's own words, then a short
direct answer
- Answers under 60 words unless the thing genuinely needs more
- Plain language, written for somebody on their first week
- For anything with steps, use a numbered list
- Add a section at the top called "When to interrupt me" that lists
the specific situations where somebody SHOULD come find me instead of
looking it up
At the very bottom, list anything I clearly know but didn't explain
well enough during the interview. Those are the gaps I need to go fill.Make the wall version:
Take the top 10 most-asked items from that doc and make me a one-page
version I can print and put on the wall. Short answers only. Big
obvious headings. It should be readable from arm's length.What to check before you trust it
Read the whole thing before anybody else does. It's writing down what you said, and if you said something half-wrong at minute 20 because you were tired, it's in there now as policy.
Check every number. Prices, hours, phone numbers, warranty periods. Those change and a stale number in a doc your team trusts is worse than no doc.
Have one of your people read it cold and mark everything they don't understand. You've been doing this so long you can't see your own jargon anymore. They can.
Anything with legal or safety weight, verify against the real source. Your insurance requirements, your license rules, your safety procedures. The doc can point to them, it should not be the authority on them.
Put a date on it and re-read it every six months. A doc nobody's touched in two years quietly becomes a doc full of lies.
— Jordan